Bundling analytics with AI is creating new MSP opportunities

Cost-conscious businesses may be increasingly walking back their public cloud investments, but one operations expert believes the spectre of recent high-profile business failures has created new opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs) to maintain service availability across hybrid environments.

“People had the cloud-first mentality for the past several years, but now they’re tightening their belts and further analysing their CSP bills and saying ‘is there any way to lower that?’” ScienceLogic CEO David Link told CRN Australia. “That’s leading them to realise the workload that they lifted and shifted and didn’t really modernise, is now likely more expensive than they were paying in a private cloud environment.”

Increasing mobility of enterprise systems, however, complicates the monitoring of multiple cloud and on-premises environments for telltale changes that are often lead indicators of an impending systems failure.

“For service providers, when your customers are having an outage, it’s a hair on fire moment,” Link explained. Given that experience has shown changes cause around 70% of outages – including recent major issues at Optus and Westpac – “you need analytics to illustrate where the problems are.”

Yet each service provider and technology vendors historically used their own monitoring tools, complicating incident response as members of response teams worked to reconcile the outputs of what could be a dozen systems or more.

“When you had an outage and got on a bridge call, everybody brought their own tool to the party and often said ‘mine looks okay’,” Link explained. “But that didn’t quickly help visualize how the entire application/cloud/network/security layers all interoperated. This tool-by-tool call bridge dialogue is a really bad way to quickly solve the problem.”

A systems monitoring global leader whose clients include high-availability government, telecommunications, and utility providers, ScienceLogic’s AIOps platform integrates multiple platforms to deliver the unified view, and supporting automation engine, that MSPs need to manage multi-tenancy environments.

The recent addition of generative AI capabilities has further bolstered data analysis across machine and human-generated content, Link said – helping MSPs maintain service standards no matter how cost considerations drive businesses to wind back their cloud presence.

“There’s typically a very quick ROI for large IT estates, saving millions of dollars per year,” he explained, noting that the extensible, open AIOps platform “allows [MSPs] to extend the product in a low code, no code development environment with machine reasoning and generative AI to deliver scintillating outcomes for your customers.”